


Three Choices

by easystreets



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Adoption, Female Protagonists, Gen, Grief, Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:01:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25142047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/easystreets/pseuds/easystreets
Summary: Hope is all they've got left..Cameron, Cuddy, and Stacy struggle with loss, difficult choices, and grief.
Relationships: Allison Cameron/ Her Husband, Greg House/Stacy Warner
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Three Choices

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for: miscarriage mention; abortion mention (no gory detail, but there is mild backlash against it in the fic). I am fully pro-choice. For those of you who are wondering, Rachel's adoption is portrayed in an incredibly positive light.

He’s smiling.

Allison has kept a meticulous journal of his descent into malady, and she marks the smiles down with a tick mark each time. In the past two weeks, his face has only vaguely contorted during lukewarm sponge baths or when his catheter is briefly removed.

Anthony is smiling, his mouth curved up in a genuine rictus, white teeth gleaming. Anthony is losing control. He reaches clumsily for the test.

“I think I’m at least six weeks,” Allison says, handing him the pregnancy test. She hasn’t time for a doctor’s appointment, and the last time they had sex-- an awkward, diluted imitation of what it could’ve been, what it once was-- had been around two months ago.

“Great,” he rasps. His hands stir. The test falls to the ground. She wonders how he’s going to be able to hold a baby. If he’ll be there to hold one. “Love you,” Anthony says, reaching for his water pitcher.

He knocks down that too, and Allison is left cleaning his mess up. He frowns sheepishly at her, and coughs, like he’s trying to get the word sorry out. She can’t find it in herself to be even remotely frustrated. She can’t bring herself to be upset at the world, because that means being angry at him.

“Love you,” she says, instead. It’s easier that way.

.

Four weeks later, he dies.

She holds one of his soft, scarred hands, and places the other over her abdomen. When she comes home, Allison sleeps. She’s suddenly exhausted; her head aches with the swirling web of thoughts it has spun.

Allison wakes up to an answering machine full of well-wishes, a series of phone calls from her mother, and blood streaking down the flesh of her inner thighs, pooling under her on the sheets.

She cries in the shower, refusing to look at the red swirling underneath her. If she does, something in her will break, she’s sure. There should be diapers under the sink cabinet, miniscule and soft, meant to be outgrown, but instead, there is an assortment of sanitary pads and a lonely box of tampons.

At the testator’s, she’s handed a small envelope containing legal documents, and a letter that Anthony must’ve written before it had gotten _really_ bad, before the tremors had capsized his body. Or had a nurse type up for him, she thinks, looking at the relatively recent date.

The letter is sweet, and then shocking: he’s frozen sperm, so that their future child can have siblings. So that she’s not alone. Allison throws the letter into the backseat of the car, and drives: fast; nowhere so that she doesn’t have to feel the fragments passing through her of lost hope, of what could have been.

It’s all she can do to keep from breaking.

.

He’s studying her.

Stacy can feel it, actually feel the intensity of his eyes boring away at her skin. If things weren’t like this, and it wasn’t about the leg-- which it always is now, she was naive to think it wouldn’t be--, Greg would be mentally undressing her, she would bet money on it.

A small laugh escapes the back of her throat. It’s not funny.

“So.” Greg says. She hates seeing him awkward, uncomfortable, struggling to find the words in a language he barely speaks on a good day. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I thought it would be our decision.” Stacy’s fibbing, and he knows it. “Our choice.” If she wanted the baby, she wouldn’t be asking.

“Your body,” Greg says, wiping some of the sweat off his forehead, “your choice.”

“Thanks,” Stacy says dryly, and goes to throw out the test and call her gynecologist for a referral. She thinks about asking for better birth control-- one of her friends swears by IUDs-- but when the opportunity arises, she hears Greg trying to clatter to the kitchen.

“No, I think I won’t be having any unprotected sex,” Stacy says, and goes to help him put a frozen dinner in the oven. His hand is burnt. She tries very hard to care.

“I love you,” she forces herself to say, when he’s finally settled into the comfortable curvature of the pull-out couch, the TV humming his favourite lullaby: The Baywatch intro. The words feel strange on her tongue; everything is wrong.

.

She feels free.

James drives her home. He isn’t an idiot, but she tells him that it was just an IUD insertion anyway. Stacy isn’t stupid either: she doesn’t want another thing for him to pin her to the cross with.

 _Baby-killers_ , spits a protester’s forgotten sign. She clutches her empty stomach. Stacy doesn’t regret the procedure, but she can’t help imagining, simply out of curiosity, what it would be like to have a family.

She would have to quit, or take on a lighter caseload. Maybe go for teaching law at a community college. She’d have to find a reliable babysitter. Her parents would want to see the kids; she would have to figure out how to make a round trip to Ohio every year on a severely impaired budget. The kid, or kids, when they got older, would want a dog. Stacy’s allergic-- they would have to settle on something small: a goldfish, maybe.

It’s not until James is needlessly helping her out of the car that Stacy realizes that she hasn’t factored Greg at all into this whimsical daydream. It’s the beginning of the end.

.

They never stay.

Of course, there have been a handful of miscarriages; a few artificial inseminations that never quite took. Lisa took basic physics in high school, she knows: every equal action has its opposite reaction; what goes up must come down. With hope comes immense trust, and she’s never been very good at that.

She’ll never be happy, she thinks, or at least until she holds Rachel for the first time.

Rachel is soft and sweet and innocent. It’s hard to believe that someone would abandon her, especially when her warm brown eyes look up at Cuddy with pure trust. Okay, maybe she understands why a person would be scared. Hell, she’s been waiting for something like this for years, has read all of the guides and blog posts, and Lisa still feels hopelessly lost.

It is terrifying. She has no one to talk to about it-- what’s the differential diagnosis for having a human’s life solely in your hands? -- and discusses it, rather one-sidedly with Rachel instead.

“I hope you trust me like this when you’re sixteen and dating,” Lisa says, holding her up gingerly. She’s cradled other babies before, sick babies, dying babies, but this is different. This little girl is hers.

There is so much love brimming in her that it feels like she could shatter. “I love you,” Lisa says, kissing her forehead.

Rachel sighs contentedly. Her little hand, with its atom-sized fingernails, grips Lisa’s. She’ll never let go.

.

She can’t sleep that night.

Lisa fitfully dreams about Rachel’s future. She wonders if Rachel will be ambitious; if there will be people, old-fashioned teachers and invidious students that try to stand in her way. If those people know that Lisa will be there to help her take them down.

She muses whether Rachel will be shy or outgoing; tall or short. There is so much potential in her. Will she want to be a doctor? Lisa won’t care if she mops floors for a living. Lisa frets over whether other children will be cruel to Rachel, if they will mock her when she comes to pick her up from school; when they find out they go to synagogue instead of Saint Augustine’s down the street.

She wonders if all mothers do this: do they fantasize about their children being soccer stars from the moment the baby kicks in their wombs? Do they hope for brown eyes or green eyes or blue? Do they worry for their futures, for what they can’t prevent?

Lisa is never going to get that-- the preamble to perfection. She doesn’t want it. Not when she can have this.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you! If you have any thoughts/commentary on this work, please leave a comment, even if you think I did something poorly. I greatly value feedback. Thanks again!


End file.
